It seems that Intel’s 10th Gen Comet Lake-S processors react quite well to faster memory. According to tests conducted by a Polish outlet, the Core i5-10600K was as much as 53% faster in gaming workloads with faster 4000MHz dual-channel RAM in comparison to the baseline DDR4-2133 MT/s memory.
The memory bottleneck was less severe with the frequency set to 1333MHz or 2666 MT/s, but many games like Total War, Witcher 3, and Assetto Corsa still saw the performance improve by ~25% when switching to a 4000MHz memory kit. It’s important to note that lower-end 400 series motherboards are limited to 2666MHz memory, so if you’re using a 10th Gen Core i5 chip, especially an unlocked part with an H-series board, you’ll be losing out on some extra performance.
It’s interesting to see that the performance gains from faster memory are nearly the same on the Ryzen 5 3600, although instead of a 4000MHz kit, it’s paired with a 3700MHz dual-channel module in a 1:1 IF configuration. This just shows how far AMD’s chiplet design has come. With the coming Vermeer chips, the inter-core latency should be even lesser, essentially cutting off Intel’s gaming advantage.
